9/11: Believe It …or Not

What do you believe? Why do you believe it? Have your beliefs changed over time?

Like most, I had beliefs in childhood that changed as I learned new information, such as my belief in the Tooth Fairy and Santa. But my steadfast belief in America, which I thought was synonymous with truth and justice, endured. When 9/11 happened, I felt justified in the awesome fury of retaliation against those who were blamed, because I believed what we were told. Having received virtually all my information from television and newspapers, I never once questioned the official version for years. After all, not only did I watch the towers fall live on the television, but the information from the experts that very day as to who did it fit perfectly with my core beliefs about America. Later, the scientific explanations as to how those towers fell came from respected sources that I also trusted, such as the National Geographic, and the PBS NOVA program. Their explanation of a natural fire induced collapse fit nicely with my still intact core beliefs about America.

But those beliefs were shaken years later when I received a short video that focused on details of the collapse that were overlooked by my trusted sources. Suddenly, something snapped. Those towers didn’t just “fall down” by gravity alone; those towers were blown up! How could I have been so gullible for so many years? Why didn’t I know about these details, such as the eutectic mixtures, the freefall of building 7, the missing jolt, the iron microspheres and the nanothermite? Any one of them, let alone all, point directly to an intentional demolition rather than a fire-induced natural gravitational “collapse.”

Well it just wasn’t right, and I had to tell others. I now believed that once people were aware of this evidence they would rise up collectively and demand justice. My, how naïve my new belief was! Much to my surprise, rather than provoke interest or outrage, what I mostly got was silence, doubt, or ridicule. I was about as popular as the one that told you that Santa doesn’t really exist.

I began to realize what a firm grip our belief systems have on us, and how loath we are to having those beliefs challenged. For many, it seems far more important to preserve a lifetime of beliefs about one’s country, religious or political views than to peek into any details that go against them. Even in my engineering world, I found it’s ok to study the scientific details of how a bridge or building falls just as long as that building didn’t fall on September 11. There seems to be a deep “disconnect” between what the average person believes and what the evidence says must be true.

So how does one counter this disconnect? Since the media and our institutions could longer be believed, I wanted to use something more credible, something that was independent of what people say. I wanted to use my belief in the fundamental laws of nature. Maybe the best way for me to explain was not telling others, but rather showing others what can or cannot happen by experiment, letting nature do the real talking. Experiment, it turns out, is the key to the scientific method. All the math and computer models in the world, whether by experts or authority, mean nothing if they don’t match a real world experiment.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was tasked with explaining what happened, but they never really told us much about the most important event, the actual collapse of those towers. They decided to stop their voluminous study at “collapse initiation”, leaving the critical mechanism that killed thousands for others to explain.

The PBS NOVA experts told us that it was a floor by floor pancake-type collapse, which they demonstrated using a computer animation. Unfortunately, that animation didn’t quite mesh with what we actually saw that day. So the story changed and the NIST endorsed the “pile driver collapse”, where the smaller “block” of top floors crushed the larger, stronger “block” all the way down to the ground, and then that smaller “block” decided to crush itself back up. Although never observed in the real world, this process was mathematically “proven” in a paper which also has a sketch clearly showing the phenomenon for those of us who may be a little rusty with differential equations.

The primary glitch appears to be with Newton’s 3rd law, which says net forces are equal and opposite. One would think that equal forces should destroy a smaller weaker block well before a larger stronger block. I decided to test Newton’s theory with some simple experiments with falling objects using various materials. Dropping the smaller block onto the larger block, I found that indeed the smaller objects couldn’t destroy any similar larger structure regardless of the material used or how many times I ran the test. That smaller block never even had a chance to make it to the bottom, let alone crush itself back up.

9/11 Experiments: Collapse vs. Demolition: Part 2

Another odd thing about the towers fall is that there was no measurable “jolt” or impact when those upper floors fell through the damaged fire zone and presumably “hit” the rest of the undamaged structure below. Rather, those upper floors continued to speed up those first few moments, almost as if they were falling right through all that strong steel and concrete.

Let’s think about this. If you jump into a swimming pool you slow down when you hit the water, right? When we watched Luke Aikins hit the net after his remarkable skydive, he also slowed down. So if the towers’ upper “block” of floors was hypothetically dropped into the ocean or a huge net, shouldn’t it also slow down? Why then did the top section continue to speed up when it hit undamaged steel and concrete below? Shouldn’t there at least have been a significant jolt when the two strong structures collided? Believe it or not that jolt is just not there. It’s missing.

In addition to experimenting with materials and motion, a couple of my experiments had to do with heat and chemical processes. One of the first official studies described unique steel with severe corrosion and intergranular melting containing a eutectic mixture consisting primarily of iron, oxygen and sulfur. No clear explanation for the source of that sulfur was identified and the corrosion and subsequent erosion was considered a most unusual event that baffled fire-wise professors. This was a problem for the official story and was never adequately explained by the NIST. Once again the corporate media came to the rescue, with the BBC stating in no uncertain terms that the source of the sulfur was from the drywall that stewed in the pile for weeks. If that was true then why was it such a mystery, and why do we routinely wrap drywall around steel to protect it from fire?

Believe it or not, the BBC didn’t even conduct a simple experiment to prove their claim. So I did. Confining gypsum drywall, diesel fuel, and aluminum around a steel beam, I burned the setup at similar temperatures for days. The result was that there was no intergranular melting or erosion of steel, just the opposite of what the BBC’s other experts told us.

A high percentage of iron microspheres and a red grey chip called nanothermite were found in the dust, neither of which should be present in the remains of any office fire. This time the National Geographic conducted an experiment that “proved” that 175 pounds of thermite could not melt a steel column. It therefore concluded that despite the direct evidence, thermitic material could not have been used to help take down the twin towers (even though it had been used in 1935 to take down a World’s Fair tower). Having no experience of this process, I decided to conduct my own experiments using far less thermite (or thermate, which is thermite with some sulfur added) just to see if I could do what the National Geographic experts couldn’t. Sure enough, after a little configuring I found that ordinary thermite could indeed melt and cut steel, contrary to what National Geographic experts told us.

Finally, while it was pretty obvious that nature was showing us what didn’t happen to those towers, I wanted to see if I could conduct an experiment to show what could have happened. This time I focused on the fact that the direction of a net force is always in line with a body’s acceleration. Net force direction as well as the sequence of applied forces is also independent of scale. Turning this around, if we observe the direction of accelerating objects then we can also determine the direction and the sequence of the net forces involved. If we can mimic similar accelerations on small objects with known forces, then we can understand the direction and sequence of net forces that also apply to large objects with similar motions.

Constructing various “towers,” I first experimented with the “pancake” and “pile driver” theories but those motions simply didn’t match what was observed when the towers fell. However, using the explosive force from internal firecrackers, we see similar horizontal and downward motions as with the towers’ destruction. This miniature controlled demolition of mine demonstrated that the sequence of motions had to be outward first, followed immediately by the downward motion from gravity. And if the outward motion came first, what force caused that horizontal acceleration? Fire and gravity cannot explain the observed motions and chemical evidence, but internal explosives and incendiaries can.

So what do we do? If you honestly believe in truth and justice, it’s imperative to do whatever you can to expose the evidence of what happened to your fellow citizens on 9/11. Speaking up rather than cowering in silence is certainly difficult and unpopular, but it’s what being a patriotic American is supposed to be all about.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in America. But the corruption, cronyism and cover-ups in our highest institutions appear epidemic and need to be weeded out if we stand a chance at fixing those problems. The loss of faith in our corporate media, as we catch them time and again in numerous lies, is growing, while belief in all our institutions that ignore the evidence and that cover up those crimes is eroding.

So how do we restore belief in America? We need to start exposing the truth and to let the chips fall where they may. Also, we need to question all official stories about world events happening today, right now, that are used to further political agendas and that are based on little or no real investigation.

Of course, we can just continue to believe whatever we want by ignoring the mountain of uncomfortable evidence, but in so doing, we are demonstrating that our personal beliefs are more important than doing what is right.

Most of us grew up and understood that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t the one who left money under the pillow, and Santa didn’t really deliver those presents, despite what we were told by those we loved and trusted. If you don’t already know by now, those towers didn’t just happen to collapse through fire and gravity alone as we were told. Those towers and the people inside were intentionally blown up.

I believe that truth matters. You can believe it, or not.

Jonathan Cole P.E. is a professional engineer with over 30 years of experience. For years he trusted the official explanations of the 9/11 building collapses until learning of many unexplained details in late 2007. He decided to research further, and conduct experiments to either prove or disprove various claims and theories of the event. His experimental videos can be found on youtube under the name of “physicsandreason” and on the website 911SpeakOut.org.

Editor’s Note: On the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and the 10th anniversary of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, the editors are pleased to announce a new website. The site now allows for easier reading and sharing of content. A new feature of the Journal is an opportunity for invited guest editorials.

Jon Cole, a civil engineer, initially accepted official explanations for the towers’ destruction. The science doesn’t work, according to Cole, who has produced a series of simple experiments and videos that call into question the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s and other official findings on the disaster. In late 2007, Cole began questioning all he heard when he was a sent a video of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.